Abramovic’s Memoir An Unnecessary Performance

Dwight Garner, the New York Times’s book reviewer, wasn’t impressed with Marina Abramovic’s memoir:

I knew I was going to dislike Ms. Abramovic’s memoir on Page 10. That’s where she declares that, as a child growing up in postwar Yugoslavia, she didn’t play with dolls or toys. Instead, she writes, in a passage that sets this book’s tone of sleek, international, Bono-level pretentiousness, “I preferred to play with the shadows of passing cars on the wall.”

A tolerance for a certain amount of pomposity is a prerequisite for keeping up with serious art; otherwise, you’re always sitting at the short table and using the plastic cutlery. In “Walk Through Walls,” Ms. Abramovic pushes this tolerance to its limits.

You will need to be able to withstand a great deal of conversation about clairvoyants and tarot cards and didgeridoos and kundalini life forces and monks and gurus and “how the soul can leave the body through the center of the fontanel of the head” to make it very far in this memoir.